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cdparanoia is a bit different than most other CD-DA extration tools. It contains few-to-no extra features ("Too many features spoil the broth") , concentrating only on the ripping process and knowing as much as possible about the hardware performing it. cdparanoia will read correct, rock-solid audio data from inexpensive drives prone to misalignment, frame jitter, and loss of streaming during atomic reads. cdparanoia will also read and repair data from CDs that have been damaged in some way using interpolation and padding sectors with silence or 0 bytes.

cdparanoia is more or less the only secure ripper available for the Linux operating system and works best on drives that have the Accurate Stream feature and do not cache audio data.

There have been series of bugfixes to cdparanoia, which date back to 9.8 release in 2001. Many of them include, pre-gap detection, buffering patches, kernel interface changes (CD-ROM routines), and support for SG_IO (application/SCSI commands). These were done in preperation for the stable 10.2 release. This is the last release before cdparanoia IV, which will not be backwards compatible with any of the previous versions.

Recently version 10.2 addresses serious CD-ROM drive cache modelling deficiencies that existed in earlier versions. In a nutshell, a sizable fraction of modern drives exhibit new and exciting readahead cache abuses/bugs of which older versions of cdparanoia were not fully aware. This means that skips and cracks could slip through the cache management strategy of older versions completely undetected. 10.2 fully addresses and models these new cache behaviors

Traditionally cdparanoia ran under GNU/Linux only although individuals have maintained side ports for other 'nix OS's. A port of this using libcdio was done in 2011. With this, cdparanoia runs on Linux and non-Linux OSes. Some additional paranoia bugs have been addressed in the libcdio port that aren't currently in cdparanoia.